A WEEK before the lockdown was introduced, I went for a drink in my local, the Duke Of-Wellington in Shoreham. It has wonderful beer from small independent breweries, friendly, welcoming staff, live music four times a week, which I help organise, and a diverse and equally friendly bunch of regulars, many of whom are my friends.

I am a very gregarious person — it’d be difficult to do my job if I wasn’t —  and I feel very much at home there. That day, I didn’t.

It was packed. I am not easily scared but in that environment, so familiar and beloved to me, I suddenly felt frightened. An icy feeling came over me. I had one pint, said goodbye to Drake the landlord and went home. As I cycled back my lungs literally breathed a sigh of relief.

I haven’t set foot in a pub, or any other crowded space, from that day to this.

I thought of that moment when I heard Neil Ferguson say that the death toll could have been halved if lockdown had happened a week earlier. I thought of it again when I heard the unspeakable Duncan Smith call for medical advice to be ignored and social-distancing rules reduced to help the economy. What a truly inhuman individual he is.

I speak as one whose profession, the entertainment sector, is going to be literally the last one of all to resume. I may well not do another gig this year — even when this mendacious, Machiavellian cabal says it’s safe to enter a crowded space I shall be holding back until the people with the brains rather than the bank accounts agree with them.

So, yes, I more than understand the need to get back to work, to restart the economy and to resume the social life vital to our happiness as a species. For the last 40 years, my job has been part of that social life. I miss it more than I can say.

And I am one of the lucky ones. Having earned my living and paid tax as a self-employed musician and poet for 38 of those 40 years, I am in receipt of the self-employed grant. Many of my fellow DIY musicians, deprived of their income through the summer festival season and not qualified for government support, are literally penniless now.

That’s the reason the £,3000 surplus from our wonderfully successful Virtual Glastonwick online festival last weekend will be going to #FieldMe, the fund set up by independent promoter Gail Something-Else, to help independent musicians with no source of income — and the reason I shall be doing further fund-raisers for it.
 
But there is one thing far worse than losing your income, your raison d’etre and your social life, and that is coughing your last on a ventilator or watching someone you love do the same.

In any form of society worthy of the name, the preservation of human life must come first.

The scientists must take the lead. But it seems likely that they will not.

Based in what has happened so far, in all probability it will be the people with the bank accounts, not the brains, who will take the decision to reduce social-distancing measures and thus compound their unspeakable dereliction of duty which has already given Britain the highest death rate in the world.

The best indicator of this is obvious. The man in charge of the science was forced out because of an unacceptable breach of lockdown regulations. The man in charge of everything else flouted those regulations in a far more flagrant way, encouraging millions more to do the same, and remains in post.

Why? Because the men with the bank accounts know that he is vital to their goal. He is the one with the understanding of behavioural psychology which, when spread via the pages and websites of four unelected press billionaires and by social-media campaigns financed by the super-rich, can induce  millions of British people to go along with, and indeed embrace, something totally unacceptable.

Even if it quite literally kills them.